Mother’s Day Music

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day.  For me, it is a time to remember those better days, when Mom was very much with us, when music filled our house in Watertown, MA.  As kids, we 4 siblings would chip-in on Mothers Day to buy mom a pot of her favorite flowers - red geraniums. 

When Mom died 17 years ago, her mind was sharp, but her body could no longer tolerate the warring ravages of cancer and chemotherapy.  My sister who still believes in an afterlife, goes annually to the gravesite on Mothers Day to replant geraniums

On one Sunday afternoon a few years ago, I visited a family friend who had been forced by declining health to move to a long-term care facility in Brookline.  He was 87 years old.  Until a few months earlier, he’d been active, sociable, and independent.   Now, he needed help to do many of the things most of us take for granted, bathing, getting dressed, preparing meals and such. 

My friend was appreciative that there are people looking after him, but also acutely aware that his freedom and mobility had become constrained.  He referred to himself and other patients as “inmates” –a subtle acknowledgement of his dependence and confinement to the premises.  One time I assured him that when he got stronger I would take him over to the Brookline Reservoir on Route 9.  During nice spring and summer days we would often sit on a bench, watching the walkers and runners, the ducks and geese, and the wind riffling the water.  He smiled at my offer, but his eyes were clouded with doubt.  Ok, we’ll see how it goes, he said. Then conversation drifts to another topic.

That Sunday happened to be Mothers Day and the activities director at the facility arranged for tea and cake in the 8^th floor dining room to celebrate the occasion.  We joined the group, composed mostly of elderly white-haired woman. Aside from a few volunteers, virtually everyone in the room was either in a wheelchair, or using a walker.  The faces were tired, their bodies bent and frail, eyes straining to focus. 

One of the coordinators said something in Russian to a woman who was sitting at a table near us.  She went to the piano and started to play.  The melody was very familiar to me: Grieg’s Piano Concerto. The music took me back to the good old days. I’d heard that same arrangement a thousand times, played by my mother on the blonde mahogany spinet that stood in our living room.   Watching the woman -- who had been raised on the other side of the iron curtain, but who had practiced the same scales and read the same sheet music as my American mother -- gave me a new insight into the magic of music as a common language that crosses political, and geographical  boundaries. 

Another woman sitting in a wheel chair, pale and thin, spoke.  “I can play,” she said in a soft childlike voice, her eyes suddenly sparkling.  She was wheeled up to the piano and she began to play ”Mona Lisa.”  You could almost hear the stiffness evaporating from her joints as her fingers moved over the keys with memorized precision.  Some of the women moved their chairs closer so they could hear better. The piano player launched into “Love is a many splendored thing”, smiling as she heard other voices singing along.  It was a wonderful moment for me, seeing how a shared gift of music can brighten the eye, gladden the heart, and give voice to faded memory.

Good Health is a finite treasure to be enjoyed while it exists.  Inevitably, the onslaught of gravity and time tears the fabric of wellness until the road ahead seems to lead in one direction -- downhill.  As the years pass, change becomes harder.  Eventually, the mind relaxes its grasp on reality.  But music can be a trigger for those happiest of memories that bring us back to the way we were.

Edited version of a piece published in 2012 in the Watertown Patch